Exploring Relationship Between Reaction Time and Academic Achievement in Science Subjects of Middle Stage Students

Reaction Time (RT) denotes the time between stimulus presentation and voluntary response and is a significant measure of sensory-motor integration with cognitive processing rate of human brain. Hence, it is imperative to study the correlation between Reaction Time rate and academic performance of the students for identifying their speed of cognitive process. An investigation was carried out for one-to-one mapping between Reaction Time rate and general proficiency in science subject of Class VIII students from Odisha Adarsha Vidyalaya, Satrusola, Ganjam, Odisha. The main hypothesis of the present study is that there exist tenable and justifiable relationships between the Reaction Time of a student with his/her performance at school in science subject. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that gender differences with respect to Reaction Time also effect on academic performances. The above two hypotheses have been investigated on 38 students (13 boys and 25 girls) who were randomly sampled from the school. The data was gathered using a mixture of Reaction Time tests with an ICT-based tool ("Reaction Tester") and Term-I examination scores on science subject. The performance on science subject was determined from scores of two formative and a single summative test in science as per CBSE's Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) framework. The mean Reaction Times for both boy and girl students were measured by using techniques of descriptive statistics. The findings revealed that boys had a lesser mean Reaction Time (589 milliseconds) than girls (607 milliseconds), which would establish the fact that the boys have faster cognitive processing rate and also better academic achievement. Further, Pearson's r-correlation coefficient between each pupil's Reaction Time (Y) and academic score (X) was also compared for entire sample of 38 students, and the magnitude of ‘r’ was found to be r = – 0.51. This finding suggests moderate negative correlation between Reaction Time and achievement score in science subject. The analysis also confirmed that correlating Reaction Time of each student with his/her score in achievement test in science subject may lead to a meaningful outcome.